The cheery sang-froid has dissipated.

I find myself more unnerved by the Pope's resignation than I was yesterday. Losing certainty in increasingly uncertain times is bad, full-stop. I pray that the next Pope has a full awareness of what he's up against. He can't be a doomsayer, but a chirpy optimist is the last thing we need.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity.

Right in the wheelwell.

A couple of months ago, you may recall this bit of eco-proselytizing involving exploding children. Even the writer for the above environmentalist website acknowledged the obvious hateful implications.



Charming--and the scoundrel's "just a joke" defense was happily ineffective.

But some Greens seem enamored with the "whack 'em!" solution.

Chris Johnson found a new approach leading to the same result: using a Mayan goddess as a mascot for a U.N. climate change convention.

Great idea: nothing says "reason and creativity" quite like a goddess worshipped by a culture which was big on human sacrifice. Including children.

Sign me up.

Not so by the way, Hernan Cortes died 463 years ago yesterday. As Ms. Figueres' mascot diety makes clear, Cortes deserves to be regarded as a great, if largely unwitting, humanitarian.

More on the Showdown at St. Martin de Porres.

Long-time FotB Maureen provided a link to The Smoking Gun, which has the police report and a mugshot of the star-crossed young protester. Apparently, the daily Massgoers were really, really hacked off:

We advised the parishoners to get off of him, at which time the w/m, John Samuel Ricci, was placed into handcuffs for his safety and our safety until we could ascertain what was going on.